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The Greenest Chip Stock You Never Heard Of

It's only natural for green chips to bring in plenty of green cash.

Billions of green chips add up to thousands of happy customers. Will happy shareholders of ON Semiconductor(Nasdaq: ONNN) follow?

$550 million of revenue was a 45% boost over the year-ago period, and GAAP earnings rose to $0.14 per share from a net loss of $0.08 per share last year. ON is enjoying the early days of a recovery in the industrial sector, right alongside a general trend toward using highly efficient semiconductors for many jobs traditionally filled by power-hungry traditional electronics.

ON's claim to fame is its expertise in exactly that sort of transformative innovation, and the company is shipping power-sipping components under an eco-friendly marketing banner. The competition includes giants like Texas Instruments(NYSE: TXN) and STMicroelectronics(NYSE: STM), but there is clearly a market for ON's product portfolio.

Businesses like ON don't lean on some flashy flagship product, but rather on a vast range of specialized, low-cost chips. According to CEO Keith Jackson, ON shipped 9 billion chips this quarter. That works out to each unit costing about $0.06, and that massive output is spread across 16,000 different products. That's a vastly different model from the smaller volume of big-ticket products like Core 2 and SnapDragon processors that Intel(Nasdaq: INTC) and QUALCOMM(Nasdaq: QCOM) have made their everyday bread and butter, but both strategies are equally valid.

Like the rest of the semiconductor industry, ON is taking more orders than it can fill these days. The company has delayed shutting down an age-old manufacturing plant in order to keep up with the unusual demand, and also supplements its internal capacity by outsourcing some products to contractors like Advanced Semiconductor Engineering(NYSE: ASX). ON is raising prices on "anything that is not under contract," and still expects customers to stick with the brand.

As a green option in a time of energy worries, and with a P/E of just 8 times forward earnings, ON is positioned to do very well for a while. I'm heading over to CAPS to rate this five-star stock "outperform" for the next couple of years, and you're welcome to follow me there.